Config Settings for Concrete 5.7 and v8

Concrete5 v5.7 and v8 allow for custom config settings to help fine tune your Concrete5 website. There are a lot of settings, this post is designed to be a reference to some of the common ones that you may need.

Your websites config file is located at /application/config/concrete.php, if it's not here you can create it and your entries will override the core config.

Disabling News and Intelligent Search

On clients sites they may not want to see the latest news from Concrete5 or the intelligent search help. You can disable them with the following settings:

return array(
   'external' => array(
      'news_overlay' => false,
      // if you want to hide news from intelligent search:
      'news' => false,
      'intelligent_search_help' => false
   ),
);

Debugging

If you need to see errors written to the page, simply amend the config like this:

return array(
    'debug' => array(
        'display_errors' => true,
        'detail' => 'debug'
    )
);

Mail Settings

If you're having trouble sending mail, try nailing down your mail settings:

'mail'  => array(
        'method'  => 'PHP_MAIL',
        'methods' => array(
            'smtp' => array(
                'server'     => '',
                'port'       => '',
                'username'   => '',
                'password'   => '',
                'encryption' => ''
            )
        )
    ),

SEO

The config file also allows for some SEO tweaks such as adding the trailing slash to the end of your page URLs, paging string for paging links and the format of default title tags when adding pages to your site:

return array(
    'seo' => array(
        'trailing_slash' => true,
	'title_format'   => '%1$s :: %2$s',
	'paging_string'           => 'ccm_paging_p'
    )
);

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of everything you can change in the config file.

If you want to see what else is possible, check out the core config file under /concrete/config/concrete.php

Default Email From Address

If you need to customise the email address that forms come from, add this markup:

'email' => array(
        'form_block' => array(
              'address' => '[email protected]'
        ),
        'default' => array(
            'address' => '[email protected]',
            'name'    => ''
        )
    ),

Remove Background Image from Login Screen

For this you'll need to open /application/config/generated_overrides/concrete.php and make sure you have the following code in there:

return array(
    // ... other stuff here ...
    'white_label' => array(
        'background_image' => 'none',
    ),
    // ... other stuff there ...
);

Use Theme for Custom Login & Register Pages

1) Make sure you have view.php in your theme and it contains the following PHP:

<?php print $innerContent; ?>  

2) Open /application/config/app.php and set it here:

'theme_paths' => array(     
    '/login' => 'theme_handle',    
    '/register' => 'theme_handle',
),